The Bard of Avon ruined it for us!

So a few weeks ago, this almost 6 feet tall friend of mine mentioned casually the words "i don’t like feminine men" while she drove us to Cannes, the rain almost immediately started gushing down fiercely as if the rain gods were almost angry when she looked twice at my face after making that comment. I mean to be fair i had a year and two months of long hair although at the exact same moment i was fascinated when she mentioned about her hometown the city of Verona, kind of ignoring whatever she meant by those words and the gawky look because to be honest if there ever would have been a fight then and there i would have definitely been schooled everyday until sunday.

Now coming back to Verona as aforementioned the first thing which came to my mind were the words “Out of her favour,where I am in love” from the 16th century old tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. I always wonder, how love was back in the olden times and how different were the people who were in love compared to these times where love is just an accessory which comes with an expiry date.

Anyway everyone has their own thesaurus versions of love and are right in their own ways afterall we are who we are with our perfections and imperfections. Apart from all the heart-wrecking, soul-crushing and too-rich-for-my-taste type of tragic love stories of our tinder times, I have one heartening short but real story which i would like to share and not to exaggerate it but it is no less than any of the scene from the movies of Shahrukh Khan, the king of romance.

So it was around 39° C last summer in Rome,me and my friend have made this stupid resolution that we would never take a local transport whenever we are in a new place however big the city might be. It was our last day and we checked out of our hostel started our padayatra thanks to guru google we were about to walk 40 minutes in the scorching hot sun from to city center to the tiburtina bus station, the heat wave that sunny season was at its absolute best but we tried hard not to complain and truth be told it was not because of our vow or our pride but the actual reason was to avert lifelong derogating taunts and name callings starting with “Remember that time when…….”

After an hour and fifteen minutes with four odd small breaks in between we reached the bus station absolutely tired and broken-down,went straight to a small cafe near the station to get ourselves back to life. I ordered a bottle of orange juice, pack of biscuits and a spicy chips packet and was about to pay, by then behind me a well dressed gentleman mostly his 80’s asked the man at the counter an ice cream to go, it seemed to me that they knew each other and as if he was a regular there as he smiled at me very kindly and was patient enough to wait for me to pay even though he had that i-have-to-be-somewhere-else-important look on his face as i paid for the things I bought and went to our bus stop which was just few meters away. As we were waiting at the bus stop and it had not been more than 30 seconds,i saw the gentleman again and and had a big ass cornetto in his hand and hurried towards a lady who was on her wheelchair who was around about his age dressed equally well matched with one-upping her man in style and suave as he gave a kiss gently on her forehead to tell her he is back. The old-man in the three piece suit gave her the ice cream cone which brought a wide smile on her face. Then that was the last i saw them talking loudly something in Italian and off they went away for a walk as if it was just another day of togetherness with million more to come!